If this interview is anything to go by, Kevin Kelly is a wonderful human being and a true role model.

Not to put them on the same level — there is a whole generation between them — but the article reminded me of a similar conversation with Merlin Mann, now more than a decade all. Good Sunday reads both.

A few links for the weekend, kind-of-sort-of in the spirit of Good Work:

• The Dying Art We All Depend On, which is to be social among strangers.
• Interdependence is My New Retirement Plan, which has actually been the case in most of the world for most of the time, but an American wrote this just last month so it is somewhat of a surprise.
• Spiritually Sensible Movies, many of which are freely available on YouTube. Bishal is a fellow oncologist writing a non-oncology focused blog, so a double recommendation there.

Apparently, I blinked and missed some extraordinarily good games on iOS that came out in recently in the last few years almost a decade ago. Fortunately my kids were there to educate me, yes, including the 6-year-old:

• Rodeo Stampede, nine years old and with ads but man what fun. Echoes of YMBAB and Crossy Road.
• Geometry Dash, which I could and should just watch my kids play because my reflexes and sense of rhythm aren’t enough for level 1 let alone this sorcery. Both the in-game music and the name reminded me of the first game I ever bought on Steam, which was of course Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved.
• Snake.io+, which brought memories of my old Nokia pouring down. But now it is a bit too competitive for my taste and I could only watch in awe as progeny raked up points two orders of magnitude higher than the runner-up.

All this reminded me of a conversation Tyler Cowen had with the YouTuber Any Austin who said that every medium reached its peak — with which I wholeheartedly agreed ⊕ And quite clearly we had reached Peak Movie in the late 1960s and the early 1970s, going downhill ever since Jaws graced the screen. — and that Peak Gaming was Pac-Man and Space Invaders — to which I could only say Huh?!

But then the more I thought about it the more I realized that he was basically correct. Well, in generalities if not in the specifics, as the Peak Single Player Video Game ⊕ Let’s not put in multiplayer games there, as they should be compared to card games, board games and sports was clearly Tetris.

I only half-kid. Show Tetris to a 10-year-old and she will immediately get it, spend a half-dozen hours on it the same day, and then dream about the figures. There are a few other gaming prototypes — and yes, Space Invaders and Pac-Man are both examples — but everything since then could be interpreted as a variation on a theme, adding whiz-bang graphics and sound effects to sugar-coat a basic mechanic. In an alternative universe where I have a PhD in ludology I would have been able to name a few more prototypes and family trees, digging into the core mechanic of each AAA title to get to its Space Invaders nugget; and if there are any blogs where this is actually done please point me to them, I would love to subscribe!

A few choice excerpts from a NYT investigation, Medicare Bleeds Billions on Pricey Bandages, and Doctors Get a Cut:

For one patient in Nevada, Medicare spent $14 million on skin substitutes over the course of a year, according to billing records reviewed by The Times. The wound of a patient in Washington State persisted after Medicare paid $6 million for the coverings. A man in Texas got $1.3 million of bandages despite having no wound at all.

Five years ago, the most expensive skin substitute cost $1,042 per square inch, while some were as cheap as $45. Today, the three most expensive products on the market each cost more than $21,000. (Samaritan Biologics, a company in Memphis that sells the three products, did not answer questions about why they cost so much.)

For the first six months of a new bandage product’s life, Medicare will set the reimbursement rate at whatever price a company chooses. After that, the agency adjusts the reimbursement to reflect the actual price paid by doctors after any discounts.

To circumvent the reimbursement drop, some companies simply roll out new products.

The doctor who earned the most for skin substitutes last year was Dr. Aaron Jeng of Southern California, according to Early Read’s analysis. Medicare paid him $117 million. (Dr. Jeng declined to comment.)

Another high earner, Dr. Stephen Dubin of Las Vegas, was paid $17 million by Medicare for skin substitutes in 2024. (He estimated that after expenses, he took home roughly $4 million.) Dr. Dubin retired at the end of last year, in part, he said, because of increased competition for wound patients. Sometimes he would show up at a patient’s home only to find that someone from a different clinic had placed a new skin substitute the day before.

The article is 3 months old but still relevant: a day after it came out the administration announced that it was indeed delaying implementation of the new reimbursement rules until 2026. Wouldn’t it be neat if there were a government department that deals with this kind of fraud, waste and abuse?

It is for the most part a reframing of what Schumacher has already written about the problems of extractive economies of scale and how intermediate technologies — to be rebranded “appropriate technologies” and, ultimately, “sustainable development” — can help remedy their dehumanizing effects. The difference is in the final chapter, “The making of Good Work”, written by one Peter N. Gillingham.

It starts with a — to the modern sensibilities rather offensive — comparison of people to different types of cattle. It quickly pivots to a discussion that is more relevant today than it was in the 1970s, about the pendulum swinging from institutions to individuals, and about the potential for a malignant entity to inhabit said crumbling institutions as a hermit crab would inhabit a dead shell. So it goes… There is much talk of people feeling the need to escape abstraction and get back to doing meaningful work in the “real world”. This was, let me remind you, written almost 50 years ago. And here I thought the Internet was to be blamed for everything.

There is next to no information about Peter Gillingham online. ChatGPT-o3 managed to dig up a few nuggets which ring true: this chapter would be his only publicly available work, the California-based Intermediate Technology Institute he led had folded within a decade of Schumacher’s death, and the 1970s oil crisis-inspired movement petered out, to be replaced by the 1980s Reagonomics, the 1990s end of history, the 2000s war on terror, and the 2010s social network boom. Of course, it is now the 2020s and the preceding four decades have all in their own way continued the hollowing out of the institutions. Americans continue to check out of capitalism, with mixed success. Everything old is new again.

So then, is this book a success or a failure? It declared the extraction party over 50 years too early and for the wrong reason: it wasn’t that the world ran out of oil, but rather that the consequences of its extraction became to dire (funnily enough, both Schumacher’s own Small is Beautiful and Donella Meadows’s Thinking in Systems hinted that this may end up happening). The book is out of print and for the most part out of the collective mind. The movements it promoted are either dead or so transformed as to be unrecognizable.

On the other hand, the themes keep being repeated: from Nassim Taleb’s promotion of localism and abhorrence of large scale, through John Vervaeke’s video essays on the meaning crisis, to Tim Harford writing about the corrosivness of commerce in the bastion of capitalism that is the Financial Times. There was, and still is, there there. Ignore it at your own peril.

It is 28°C with 30% humidity and a cool breeze coming from the east. This is one of the many reasons we are again spending the summer in Serbia.

Twelve years ago I made a single $50 payment for continued development of MailMate. This has been one of the best software purchases I have ever made, so I didn’t hesitate for a moment when the developer asked for continued support at $40 per year. I consider it an enshittification avoidance fee.

🍿 Heretic (2024) was a low-budget, high-suspense portrayal of a psychopathic Hugh Grant, and unlike his prior attempt it just flew by even at 110 minutes run time. The movie has four actors, a few set pieces and no highfalutin' special effects: kudos to A24 for still making them this way.